This town in Vietnam's mountains is misty, beautiful - and swarming with impoverished, pushy women.

Photograph by: Susan Riley
, Postmedia News

If you are planning a trip to Vietnam - and isn't everybody, these days? - you may be tempted to do some trekking among the colourful hill tribes in the northern Hoang Lien Son mountains around Sapa.

The brochures are alluring: steeply sloped green peaks bathed in brilliant sunshine; ruddy-cheeked tribe women wearing bright colours and smiling warmly; the promise of clean air and tranquillity after the chaos of Hanoi. Sapa has an exotic back-story, too: a former French colonial hill town, founded around 1900, it sits high (1,600 metres) in a remote pass close to the Chinese border.

But, as I discovered on a recent visit, not quite remote enough. In fact, unless you have a well-developed sense of the absurd and immense tolerance for the hard sell, you might want to think again. From the moment you step out of your minivan in the town of Sapa (pop. 40,000), after a 90-minute drive up the mountain, you will be besieged by Hmong women - short, friendly, decked out in bright head scarves, patterned umbrellas and dark leggings and as persistent as black flies.

They followed us everywhere on our March visit - even on a three-hour "trek" through high pastures, sodden rice paddies and down slippery goat paths to a neighbouring village. We told them we weren't buying the blankets, trinkets and scarves they carry in woven baskets; we asked them politely to let us walk in peace; finally, we affected tight smiles and tried ignoring them.

Nothing worked. Every foreign tourist (and there were many) had their own personal entourage of three or four women and girls, dogging their every step, asking repeatedly: "What is your name? Where are you from? You buy something from me?"

Some tourists are charmed; check out the online commentary. They bond with their particular hill tribe friend and follow them to their simple homes for a meal or overnight stay. (Prices are negotiable and reasonable). This, for some, is that all-too-rare authentic travel experience - and the competition for the tourist dollar is certainly authentic.

There are at least five different hill tribes living in the Sapa area, mainly Hmong, Dao and Tay. Each group wears a different costume - bright head scarves, indigo cloaks, leggings and hats of all descriptions. Until the tourist avalanche of the mid-'90s, they lived a marginal existence trying to raise crops and animals in challenging terrain and to remain culturally independent of Vietnam.

They are friendly and not at all menacing - although, sometimes, they seem bored with their well-rehearsed pitches and our predictable replies. But to call them merely "entrepreneurial" as our guidebook did, is like describing Don Cherry as a little overdressed.

They lay in wait outside our (freezing) hotel lobby, pressing their smiling faces, and their plump babies' faces, into the glass windows. They arrived in town early, by the truckload (from their hill villages), and worked Sapa's warren of narrow streets until dark.

They followed us through dense fog and drizzly rain, down quiet alleys, through the bizarre and busy market, back to the hotel after dinner. The only escape was to enter a restaurant or shop, but the restaurant fare wasn't appetizing (a lot of mediocre French and Italian) and the shops mostly sold North Face knock-offs and the same colourful hill tribe crafts the women peddled, only at lower prices. This cat-and-mouse game is hardly surprising. We foreign tourists are like a river of money running over parched ground. The nomadic agriculture that used to occupy the colourful hill tribes clearly doesn't pay as much as tourism - in fact, hunger used to be common. Now the government has trouble keeping children in school, particularly girls, given how much more lucrative it is to chase tourists.

But it can be disheartening - and, ultimately, could be self-defeating for these impoverished ethnic minorities - to see people reduced to museum exhibits. A low point in our visit was a three-kilometre walk down the mountain from Sapa on a spacious stone pathway (clearly a government infrastructure project) to a "typical" hill-tribe home in the village of Cat Cat.

It was like an Upper Canada Village of poverty: four or five dirty, ill-clad children playing inside the window less interior, damp wood emitting smudges of charcoal-coloured smoke, black hairy pigs rooting around the door, the colourful hill tribe women working a loom on the porch. While they worked, tall, well-fed westerners wearing expensive outerwear poked around their living space. Outside another house, a thin monkey was chained to the porch - a sad survivor of a species that was once abundant.

What no amount of desperate commerce or compromised culture could spoil, however, were the magnificent vistas - mountain peaks, many deforested, some covered in bamboo forest, criss-crossed with stone fences, or, in the valleys, gracefully terraced rice paddies. And mist. To be precise, 160 days of mist a year. Plus cloud, plus rain; the usual drapery of mountainous regions. It was mystical, if damp: water buffalo would emerge suddenly out of the drifting gloom, while women built stone fences in a steady drizzle.

It was cold, too - not just outside, where it ranged from nine to 13 degrees, but in the unheated hotel rooms and lobbies. We didn't pack warm-enough jackets, thick-enough socks or heavy-enough sweaters and, while you could buy dog meat and a wild array of unfamiliar herbs at the local market, there wasn't a woollen vest to be found. Only cheap fleeces.

Anytime between September and May will likely be chilly. From May to August temperatures can climb to sub-tropical range, but it rains even more then. Be sure to pack hiking boots, or you'll have to buy cheap imitations locally or rent rubber rain boots for $1 from your hotel. That's what we did, and our feet stayed dry, but the mud was so slick we were almost sliding down the hills. One worthwhile purchase: a $1 bamboo pole from the avid child vendors.

After the views, the other worthwhile part of the trip was the overnight train from Hanoi where we shared a comfortable four-person berth. But it deposited us in the border town of Lao Cai at 4:30 a.m.

Unfortunately, our Intrepid Travel tour guide didn't show up, so we ended up paying $30 - 10 times the going rate - to be shoe-horned into another crowded van for the final leg up the mountain to Sapa. (We got the money back later.)

Our five-day tour (at about $245 each) was supposed to include a "homestay" at a village some seven kilometres from Sapa, but we bailed after seeing the unheated bunkhouses - which are really tourist holding pens - where we were expected to sleep. It was just too wet and too cold, and the prospect of making small talk for hours with our designated "family", while trying to stay warm beside a small, struggling fire was a bit too authentic. We fled back to Hanoi - grey and beatup and not particularly warm, but a real city at least.

The really fit and keen might want to try a few days trekking up nearby Mount Fansipan (3,143 metres), but be warned: other visitors report garbage on the mountain, uncharming bamboo huts and cold winds. It might be worth splurging on the high-end Victoria Sapa Resort and Spa Hotel, with its designated train car from Hanoi. It costs about $150 per night, but the rooms are reportedly heated.

Count me out, though. My lasting memory of the Sapa region will be standing on a steep hillside looking down at the "remote" village of Ta Van - a collection of ramshackle wooden cabins along a small river rushing through a deforested valley. Except for the queue of western tourists, many wearing rain ponchos, shuffling from restaurant to craft shop to waiting tour buses - with their escort of colourful hilltribe women, of course - it was untouched. Well, almost.

Susan Riley writes a regular political column for the Citizen and travels as much as she can. You can e-mail her at sriley.work@gmail.com

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